Meople News: Divine Void

Dr. Finn’s Games

If you’re looking for a quick and ruthless filler game, then Dr. Finn’s Kickstarter Cosmic Run: Rapid Fire might just be the thing for you. It’s a dice-drive space race for one or two players marking their progress on the scoring pad. Once the dice are rolled, players take turns picking a die and applying its effect. This being a racing game, moving your ship is obviously an option, but other dice allow you to attack your opponent or to use a number of special effects, like putting mines on the race track. Just because it’s a race doesn’t mean you have to behave sportingly.

Alderac

Thunderstone Quest (Alderac)

The Kickstarter for Thunderstone Quest has already destroyed its funding goal, but it’s still has a long time to go even higher. A good time for more detailed preview posts! This one talks a bit about quests, and combat, and why they decided to add dice to the game. Some monsters now roll dice before you fight them, and as you might have guessed you’re not generally going to like the outcomes. Also in this post are some really cool monster illustrations.

Red Raven Games

Ryan Laukat is at it again with a sequel to one of his greatest hits: Empires of the Void II. Again, the players want to carve out a space for their people in the galaxy, either by force or by diplomacy. The fringes of the galaxy, where all players arrive in their worldships, are more densely populated than you would think and there will be many planets already inhabited. You can conquer those for profit, or you can ally yourself with the natives. Alliances are not permanent, another player may gather more influence on a planet’s inhabitants than you have. But while they last, each allied people give you a powerful special ability. Empires of the Void II is going to be a long, strategic game that keeps up to five players busy for around two hours.

Greater than Games

The year is 2299 and the last war is distant history. But its consequences are still very visible in the ruined city of Dubai, that only now the descendants of the survivors begin to rebuild. That’s the premise for Dubai: Rebuild the Ruins, a worker placement game by Greater than Games. There are three locations for your workers to go: at the Docks all players act at once in an auction for resources, at the Engineer’s Guild they buy plans for your rebuilding projects and in the Ruins they construct them. That’s all simplified from the actual rules, of course. Especially it doesn’t mention that you don’t just place and remove your workers in Dubai, they rotate around their locations and will trigger actions when it’s their turn, controlling the game’s dynamic turn order that way.

Mücke Spiele

Babylon Tower Builder (Mücke Spiele)

Babylon Tower Builders is the next release by German publisher Mücke Spiele, and it’s a game that came out of an interesting premise: a game that uses the remaining stock of pieces from Wolfgang Kramer’s Alcazar, of which surplus game piece shop www.spielmaterial.de had rather a lot. Designer Channing Jones rose to the challenge and created not one but two games using those pieces, both of which are Babylon Tower Builders. In the tactical game players all cooperate to build one edifice from the tower and bridge pieces. In the real-time game, each player participates in building two, one with each of his neighbors. In both cases, points are awarded for each player’s noblemen on the building: by majority per floor in the tactical game and for topping towers (with certain conditions) in the real-time one. Both game variants are pretty quick to play, and making them is the best way I heard of to use up surplus components.

Ares Games

Card-driven racing game is not something that gets many gamers excited any more, and placing bets on those races is also not new. Ares Games had something special in Divinity Derby with the setting, a race between mythical creatures, with Zeus as the judge and the other gods betting, but they needed some new mechanism to make it interesting. That mechanism is card sharing: players don’t have their own hand of cards, they share a set of cards with each of their neighbors. It doesn’t sound like a big change of having your own cards, but it does some interesting things. You will always know half the information your neighbors have access to, but not all, and you can take those cards away from them and use them first. Now it sounds much more interesting, doesn’t it?

Game Salute

Lots of games have you flying around in your cool spaceship solving problems. Not so many let you build your own spaceship first. In Game Salute’s Farlight, you do both. First, you buy spaceship components, mission briefings and special actions. From the components you assemble your spaceship, if you can make the cards fit together. Components may give you bonuses once or every turn, and they increase your ship’s performance in various areas. This last part is important because it’s how you complete missions, your ship has to meet the mission’s parameters. If it doesn’t by the time the mission phase starts, then your bid on that mission is wasted and the next player gets a chance. I think in what order you bid on things will be key here, and Farlight will be very interactive because of that.

The beautiful panorama above this post was taken in the Kyrgyz part of the Tien-Shan mountain range, a world heritage site shared between Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. This beautiful photo was taken by Oleg Brovko. Thanks for sharing, Oleg! (* * *, Oleg Brovko, CC-BY-SA)

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Older Reviews

Being rich, influential and groomed for political office, that must be such an incredibly boring life. Why is it that the lower classes get all the fun? Well, you’re not going to let them have it without you, and if you have to get rid of your wealth and your good reputation to join them, then so be it. That’s why you and some equally rich and dimwitted friends started the Prodigals Club, a contest of who can most effectively ruin their future.

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Games let you play different roles and do things that you wouldn’t do in real life. At least I assume most people playing necromancers in a fantasy RPG, for instance, don’t mess around with the dead in real life. I’ll also assume that most people playing Christope Boelinger’s Illegal don’t really deal with drugs or weapons. That’s the role you take in this adults only party game: that of a distasteful criminal trading his illegal goods for other goods.

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Uwe Rosenberg is well known for his deep, complex games like Agricola, Glass Road or Fields of Arle. But those are not all he does, he’s equally skilled at small and deceptively simple looking games. In this one, you don’t have to feed your starving farmers, you don’t work and pray in a monastery, you don’t even sell your vegetables at the gates of Loyang. All you have to do is simply make a patchwork blanket.

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Mascarade is proof that a good game doesn’t need many components. With just 13 cards and some paper coins, Bruno Faidutti created an intense game of bluff and confusion that works for up to 13 players.

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It is the Countess’ flower ball, and you are invited. Since the countess kind of digs flowers (not literally, she had gardeners for that…) – you want to bring her the most beautiful bouquet of flowers and thus get the most sympathy points. But beware – the countess may be a bit greedy for the flowery stuff – but excessiveness is not rewarded. After all it is still Noblesse Oblige!

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Sanssouci, a palace in Potsdam near Berlin, Germany. It’s famous for it’s beautiful gardens, and those gardens are what Michael Kiesling wants you to recreate in the game named Sanssouci. But it’s not about their beauty, their symmetry or even their completion. All you care for is: how far down the garden paths can someone walk?

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What comes out when you take two popular games, add some dashes of more games, and then run that mix through a cocktail shaker? That’s what Friedemann Friese wanted to know when he created Copycat from odds and ends of the Top Ten games on BoardGameGeek. And what came out … well, read for yourself.

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Usually, when a game is about traveling a road, you win by arriving first at the destination. Of course racing is fun, but it’s not the only way to travel. Sometimes, going slowly and enjoying the trip is what you should be doing. Antoine Bauza’s Tokaido rewards that type of travel, here the winner is the player who had the richest experience along the way. That makes Tokaido very different from a racing game, and in the best way, too.